Rewriting Chronicles in an Urban Environment. The Middle Dutch 'Excellent Chronicle of Flanders' Tradition

Abstract

The fifteenth-century Low Countries witnessed the emergence of prose chronicles written in the vernacular. The most important medieval Flemish chronicle tradition in the vernacular was the 'Excellent Chronicle of Flanders'. This tradition probably started shortly after 1423, when the so-called Flandria Generosa C was translated into Middle Dutch. A number of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts survive, in addition to a printed version of 1531. Like many other medieval chronicles, the Excellente Cronike tradition is an 'open text', in which authorship interacts with the text's relationships to other texts, with practices of speech, aurality and discourse, and with readers and listeners within certain social and cultural environments. Selected case studies linking different manuscripts to specific milieus in the urban environments of Ghent and Bruges illustrate this interaction.